The deployment of large scale databases in commercial organizations and others has led to improvements in sales forecasting, inventory control, and other strategic predictions. One prevailing technique is to run analytic reports against databases, for instance online analytic processing (OLAP)-compliant databases, to identify trends and other significant information.
However, the use of such engines may not be convenient or user friendly. For instance, many OLAP-based intelligence engines may require a manager or other user to be seated in front of a workstation equipped with a standard query language (SQL) or other database-compatible software package in order to initiate, view, modify, or store reports. Productivity might be improved if the users of such systems could obtain easier and less cumbersome access to the query engines, reports and other outputs. Other problems exist.